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64th Congress 
td Session 



SENATE 



Document 
No. 692 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 



ARTICLE 



BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS 
OF THE WOMAN QUESTION 



MRS. ANNIE RILEY HALE 



n 






PRESENTED BY MR. McCUMBER 
January 19, 1917. — Referred to the Committee on Printing 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1917 






SENATE RESOLUTION NO. 337. 

Reported by Mr. Chilton. 

In the Senate of the United States, 

January 31, 1917. 
Resolved, That the manuscript submitted by the Senator from 
North Dakota (Mr. McCumber), on January 19, 1917, entitled 
"Biological and Sociological Aspects of the Woman Question, "^bj 
Mrs. Annie Riley Hale, be printed as a Senate document. 
Attest: 

James M. Baker, 



D« of D. 
FEB 14 1917 



BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE WOMAN 
QUESTION. 

By Mrs. Annie Riley Hale. 



Men accustomed to A^iewing only the political aspects of double 
suffrage are prone to overlook a deeper significance hidden in certain 
underlying principles of biology and sociology. 

Not as politicians, but as the sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers 
of women, I ask your consideration of the following fundamental 
facts inseparably bound up with the welfare of the race: 

Man and woman, differently constituted in every fiber of their 
being, have a different contribution to make to the world, a different 
part to play both in government and in industry; and for their 
separate rdles they manifestly require a separate training. The 
feminist contention, that women require masculine activities for their 
development, is as scientifically unsound as it is socially pernicious. 
All the laws of growth are against it, for everything grows to greatest 
perfection which grows naturally and easily — along the lines of its 
own being. "The best of the higher evolution of mind will never be 
safely reached," said Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, "until the woman accepts 
the irrevocable decree which made her woman and not man. Some- 
thing in between she can not be." "Doing a man's work in a man's 
way," says Ida Tarbell (who has, incidentally, been doing a man's 
work for some years), "almost invariably means for a woman self- 
consciousness, friction, self-suppression. It is costly to society and 
to the individual, for it means at least the partial atrophy of powers 
and qualities peculiar to woman, and essential to the harmony, the 
charm, and the vigor of society. Her differences are her strength; 
their full growth completes the human cycle; to suppress these dif- 
ferences is to rob not merely her individual life, but the life of the 
world, of its full ripeness." 

And there is a yet darker side to the feminist project of converting 
the world into "an epicene institution" — to quote Sir Almroth 
Wright — wherein men and women shall labor, fight, and love on the 
same moral and physical plane. In preparation for writing "The 
Eden Sphinx," I had occasion to examine many works on biology 
and sex psychology, and with but one exception — Weininger, a Ger- 
man authority, whom the others pronounced a lunatic and his work 
clearly pathological — I found the interpreters of the life force and 
the laws governing its operation a unit in affirming fundamental sex 
differences — structural, physiological, and psychical — between man 
and woman; and that these differences increase as we ascend the 
evolutionary scale; that the difference is more marked between a 
highly developed man and a highly developed woman than between 
primitive man and woman. 

In a word, the scientists say that " civilization rises and falls with 
sex differences," and that all attempts to erase these are in conflict 
with the law of development and pointing backward instead of for- 
ward. Because of the psychological law governing occupations, 
because the character of one's work invariably gets into the nature 
and character of the worker, it is patent that the feminist ambition 

8 



4 WOMAN SUFFKAGE. 

to duplicate all men's activities — and in some cases their preroga 
tives — in the lives of women, if pursued to its ultimate conclusion' 
will make of us in due season a race of mannish women and womanish 
men, and this — in the judgment of all medical authorities, past and 
present — spells racial degeneracy. Ask your physician what trans- 
vestism means — or look it up in a medical dictionary — if you would 
properly interpret the woman who is proposing to measure arms with 
man in every field of endeavor. You will see that, so far from being 
the vanguard of freedom and progress she so proudly proclaims 
herself, she is in reality the apostle of decadence, and the herald of 
moral and social chaos. Already there is grave cause for apprehen- 
sion in the ever-increasing number of women who wish to usurp men's 
functions, and the increasing number of men who are willing to have 
them do so. These are the warning indices of the peril that confronts 
us. The creed of feminism — of which suffragism is an integral part — 
is very definitely and succinctly set forth by one of their number, 
Olive Schreiner (author of " Woman and Labor"), in the words: 
"For the present we take all labor for our province. From the 
judge's seat to the legislator's chair; from the stateman's closet to the 
merchant's desk; from the chemist's laboratory to the astronomer's 
tower, there is no post or form of toil for which it is not our intention 
to fit ourselves. There is no closed door we do not intend to force 
open, no fruit in the garden of knowledge it is not our determination 
to eat." 

But what says science to this bold program ? Herbert Spencer — 
the man who first popularized the scientific theory of evolution — 
explained the physical handicap sex imposes upon woman on the 
theory that "there is a positive antagonism between the higher evo- 
lutionary tendency and reproduction;" and that "the more exten- 
sive organic expenditure demanded of the female by the reproductive 
functions, limits the feminine development to a notably greater ex- 
tent than the masculine." This "Spencer's Biological Law," as it 
was called, had the indorsement of such authorities as Darwin, 
Huxley, Lombroso, Milne Edwards, Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis, 
Oskar Schultze, and a score of others who might be named. They 
all concur in the idea that the unquestionably existing physical differ- 
ences between the sexes correspond equally without question to ex- 
isting psychical differences, using the word "psychical" in its relation 
to the whole spiritual being — mind, will, and feeling. "To suppose," 
says Herbert Spencer, "that along with the unlikenesses between 
their parental activities, there do not go unlikenesses of mental facul- 
ties, is to suppose that here alone in all nature there is no adjustment 
of special powers to special functions." 

The history of human society from its beginning abundantly con- 
firms the scientific theory on this head. Everywhere in the domain 
of creative thought — in science, art, literature, invention, and religion 
even — it is man who has led, and woman, where she has entered these 
fields at all, has been for the most part a feeble imitator. There are 
no female counterparts for such names as Bach, Handel, Chopin, 
Verdi; Phidias, Da Vinci, Rubens, Turner, Millet; Homer, Shakes- 
peare, Dante, Goethe, Milton, Burns; Aristotle, Roger Bacon, New- 
ton, Darwin, Spencer; Socrates, Plato, Francis Bacon, Locke, Berke- 
ley, Kant, Edison; Confucius, Buddha, Mahomet, Swedenborg; and it 
is idle to contend that this is due to accident or custom. The expla- 
nation lies in the bedrock of sex differentiation. 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 5 

But why should any one argue from this that woman is in anywise 
inferior to man, or that her work in the world is of less import ? Sex 
equality does not mean identity of function, as the feminists and 
suffragists seem to think, neither does cooperation imply duplication 
of effort ; but just the contrary. Who is sponsor for the idea that 
man's work, any of it or all of it, is more important than the man 
himself i Is the building of railroads and telegraphs more valuable 
to the nation than the physical and moral improvement of the race? 

Yet this is woman's special mission, because to her is intrusted the 
life force in a peculiar manner; into her hands is given the guardian- 
ship and training of the race in its early, plastic stage. Not only 
as the mother, but as the teacher, at the time when teaching counts 
for most, she is given supreme control of the two greatest forces in 
life — nature and nurture. 

Her larger share in the work of carrying forward the stream of life 
gives her a stronger pull with the child than the father, even before 
its birth; while the obligation the state lays on him of earning the 
family's support takes him out of the home and leaves the mother 
practically a free hand in creating the "early social environment," 
which all sociological authorities agree absolutely controls the future 
of the nation. In short, the mother furnishes, or at least has the 
opportunity of furnishing, the bulk of hereditary tendencies; and the 
mother, assisted by the grandmother, maiden aunt, or older sister, if 
there be such in the home, and by the woman teacher, in the day 
school, in the Sunday school, furnishes practically all of the environ- 
ment in which the young human plant buds and flowers; and heredity 
plus environment pretty nearly sets the boundaries of human destiny. 
There is not a dissenting note from this among all the sociologists, 
educators, and publicists of the world from the most ancient to the 
most recent. "The mind of the growing generation controls the 
future conduct of the nation," says Boris Sid is, the famous Russian 
educator and child psychologist of New York City, who in this merely 
echoes the teaching of Solomon, Socrates, and Plato; while Ellen 
Key, in her excellent works on child culture, upholds the maxim of 
the Jesuits as to the crucial importance of "the first eight years." 

And the point requiring special emphasis— because feminists and 
suffragists are doing their utmost to obscure it — is that this crucial 
period of individual development having been left for centuries in 
woman's hands lays upon our sex the greater fundamental responsi- 
bility for abuses; and that man's failure in the state or in society is 
only the logical fruit of woman's failure in the home. It is a curious 
twist of logical sequence in suffrage propaganda that they appear 
to think whenever they can score against men, they are scoring for 
women. In truth, their man-indicting formulas only saw off the 
limb they are sitting on, and put them in the position of Aesop's 
wolf who charged the lamb downstream with muddying the water. 

The measure of woman's responsibility for abuses, social and gov- 
ernmental, is the measure of her opportunity for preventing them. 
Much good remedial legislation passed by male electors and legis- 
lators fails of enforcement because women have neglected their 
foundational task of training an enlightened, responsible public senti- 
ment, which is essential to the enforcement of any statutory law. 
Food experts are everywhere proclaiming that a scientific knowledge 
of cooking and proper regulation of children's habits in eating and 
drinking would do more to abolish the demon rum than all the 



6 WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 

prohibition laws from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Miss Lathrop, of 
the Federal Child Welfare Bureau, said in a recently published state- 
ment that 300,000 babies die annually in the United States through 
their mothers' ignorance of the simplest principles of infant hygiene. 

The disingenuous suffrage claim that "mothers need the ballot 
with which to protect the home," can be met with the incontrovertible 
fact that what the home needs protection from chiefly is from the 
ignorance and incompetence of the so-called "home makers." Their 
other flippant pronouncement that "it wouldn't take a woman more 
than 10 minutes to vote" may be very justly rebuked with the 
remark that the important thing about woman and the home is not 
how much time she spends in it or away from it, but knowing her 
business when she is there. 

It is not home as a place, but home as an ideal, an institution, 
which is important; and this is, or should be, woman's supreme 
concern, no matter where she is, because it is her supreme reward, 
for it is here she must find her happiness, if at all. 

In these howling feminist days of scornful denunciation of every- 
thing distinctly feminine — of stigmatizing the home as "a prison," 
and the home duties as "household drudgery" — it is necessary to 
remind the normal woman that even if it be a cage, it is the cage that 
holds the Bluebird for her. In no other place can she find it. 

A psychologic truth missed by the feminists and suffragists — for 
they are as bad psychologists as logicians — is that it is not what one 
gets out of a task but what one puts into it that makes it interesting. 

The home worker who finds her work dull, colorless, and irksome 
is she who has never put any intelligent thought into it, who is 
performing it probably on the lowest possible level; and the truth 
she needs to grasp is that nothing is fine, neither love nor work, 
until we put thought into it. The occupation of home making is 
useful, necessary work not excelled, if equaled, in importance by 
any other work in the world. It can be made as much of a "fine 
art" as the cultural development of the home maker will allow. 
The woman who is making a success of it, whether by doing the work 
herself or by supervising the work of others, to achieve the net 
result of a well-ordered, peaceful abode, is as honorably employed 
as any Government official or professional man; and she is as eco- 
nomically independent as if she were working for a factory boss or 
the head of a business firm. The feminist charge that all wives who 
accept a support from their husbands are "living by their sex" is 
not only a gross distortion of the marital relation, but in the case of 
the honest home worker it is an economic lie. Material home 
comfort is a marketable commodity which when furnished in hotels, 
clubs, and boarding houses, is rated rather high; the fact that a 
woman is providing it for her own husband and children instead 
of the public does not in the least alter this economic side of it, and 
her sex relation has nothing to do with it. That is high or low in 
character according to the character of the individual parties to it. 
Parasitic women there are of course, have always been, in every class 
of life; the idle, sensuous, mollusk type, who merely lives to bedeck 
her person and gratify sensual desires. But unless we can arouse 
and shame her into penitential effort to render some honest equiva- 
lent for her maintenance we'd much better leave her to afflict the 
individual man who was unlucky enough to get her than to make her 
the excuse for driving all women out of the home to become the 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 7 

industrial oppressors of all men: and this is what "economic inde- 
pendence" of the feminist brand moans in the last analysis. 

In view of the. fact that the woman in public industry is more 
often cited as a '•reason" for double suffrage than almost any other, 
it might be well for the men who favor it on this ground to investi- 
gate the deleterious effects of her participation in outward strife 
in so far as it has been tried. 

Whole libraries of evidence have been given by doctors, factory 
inspectors, investigators, and officials of every grade as to the harm- 
fulness to health and morals of dragging and driving women through 
the marts of public industry. Even the noted feminist teacher, 
Ellen Key, who once advocated all the new doctrines, in her latest 
work, "The Renaissance of Motherhood," completely reverses her 
former position in saying: ''The racially wasteful, socially pernicious, 
and soul-withering consequences of the employment of wives and 
mothers outside the home must cease." 

So the advocates of double suffrage who rest their case on woman's 
invasion of public industry are saying in effect, "Seeing we have one 
foot in the mire, let's put the other in." 

It is unhappily true that some women have been forced by the 
exigencies of circumstance into the outer struggle and have acquitted 
themselves well and creditably. But accepting a thing as a misfor- 
tune and trying to make the best of it is a very different proposition 
from a deliberate, systematized plan to reorganize society on that 
basis in the name of economic independence and personal freedom 
for women. The wholesale employment of European women in 
men's callings as a result of the war, while too early yet to mark its 
baneful effects upon the women, is already bearing disastrous fruit 
in the greatly increased death rate of children. This has become so 
alarming in London that the authorities have taken steps to mitigate 
its worst features. 

Yet everywhere in feminist circles the shouldering of men's 
burdens by European women is acclaimed as a triumph of feminist 
philosophy, as marking the "liberation" of women. They proudly 
cite this as proof of her complete "equality" with man, not under- 
standing that it is a cruel wastage of the forces of womanhood, and 
curiously blind to what it reveals of their real attitude toward man. 
The insane craving to imitate all his performances betrays a slavish 
admiration of the male creature that but ill accords with their some- 
time rancorous indictment of his selfishness and tyranny. It also 
betrays a contempt for woman and woman's work that is well-nigh 
pathological in its distorted sense of social values. Whatever else 
may be said for it, the holders of this view can not be properly called 
" emancipated." Whether they realize it or not, it reveals them 
dragging a sexual chain or bound fast in Promethean bondage to the 
masculine rock. The only "free woman" is the one who knows she 
has a womanly individuality to be developed in all womanly ways; 
and the only reason women are ever weak and ineffective is because 
they have not been thus developed, have not discovered the cultural 
possibilities of their woman job. 

Woman suffrage per se is negligible. Merely voting, divorced 
from office seeking and office holding, or otherwise actively partici- 
pating in practical politics, is not worth all the fuss that is being 
made over it either by its advocates or opponents. It is significant, 
not because of the thing itself, but because of the animating motive 



8 WOMAN SUFFBAGE. 

that is back of the demand; because of what is lurking under it, and 
skulking behind it. That which lurks beneath it, constituting the 
only logical basis for it, is sex distrust and sex hostility; and while 
these unhappily exist in some instances, we should not encourage 
them as permanent social ideals by adapting government to them. 

Even as an instrument of sex war, the woman ballot is futile and 
superfluous. The argument that she could wrest from man any extra 
concessions through an instrument which it is optional with him to 
grant or withhold carries an inherent contradiction that throws the 
whole case for woman suffrage into the realm of logical absurdity. 
For surely if the majority of men are willing to give her the ballot, 
they are just as willing to give her anything she could obtain by the 
ballot; and if the majority of men are not willing to grant it, she will 
never get it. So that the ballot chasers are thrown upon the horns of 
a senseless dilemma. At its best, double suffrage is a wasteful duplica- 
tion of a governmental function — by no means the most important — ■ 
already being performed by men; and at its worst it is the outpost of 
feminism, which is skulking behind it, and which by its proposal to 
substitute the competitive or duplicative, for the complementary, 
sex relation, is striking at the family unity whose cementing bond is 
the sex interdependence and mutual helpfulness of its parental heads. 
Such interdependence arises from an equitable distribution of duties 
and responsibilities, assigning home government to woman and state 
control to man, in accordance with their natural sex differences, and 
also makes for efficiency in each sphere. If modern industry has 
taught us anything it is that the keynote to efficiency is division of 
labor, specialization, and concentration in one's chosen vocation. 
Home government is essentially personal; State government is essen- 
tially impersonal; only greater confusion, inefficiency, and waste 
could result from sex competition or duplication of effort in these two 
distinct but closely allied spheres. 

Since the home government antedates the state in every case, and 
exactly determines the character of it, woman's share in the nation's 
life is much more important than man's; and no set of women who 
ignore this truth, who are so superficial and dishonest in their think- 
ing as to evade woman's fundamental responsibility and charge up 
her failures and misfortunes to " man-made laws" and man-imposed 
conventions, are worthy leaders of any really constructive and pro- 
gressive "woman movement." To argue, as suffragists do, that the 
woman ballot will behave differently from woman herself, or that 
she can retrieve at the polls her failures in the home, is to reveal 
a quality of unreasoning smugness which of itself is sufficient con- 
demnation of their propaganda. 

When women shall learn their own business, so that the majority 
of the male voters issuing from their home rule shall be sufficiently 
trained in standards of honor and public duty to learn what they 
are voting about, and vote their convictions without fear or favor, 
it will be time enough then to discuss the advisability of adding 
women to the electorate. But as this will require several genera- 
tions, and the state is standing all it can bear at women's hands in 
these unfit, irresponsible, "woman-made" men she is contributing to 
its service, there is absolutely no occasion for this generation either 
to settle or even consider the question of woman suffrage. 



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